P4 prescott with 300W power supply

[guptakaps]

Are there any known issues with P4 prescott running with 300W power supply?

I am experiencing a problem where my PC boots up (almost like a PC reset) without any warning..page fault etc. and it is totally random. Have tried checking memory, flashed Bios etc.

Could Power supply be the cause of this?

Thanks in advance

Kaps.

 

[jurgen36]

Power supply. You need at least a 400 watt supply, I use 800 watt supplies with the P4 3.4 HT E Prescot chips, 400 watt was si,ply not enough. Regards

Jurgen

 

[m33sta]

Most of the sullpiers recomend 400w PSUs for P4s I have seen a couple of 300w PSUs for sale I have a 3.0g P4 radeon9800 pro and a gig of ddr ram plus many USB devices and a kickin sound card all running fine on my 400w PSU
they do have 550w PSUs but i think they are more aimed at forthcoming technology. A suggestion would be plug in chip hardrive, memory and graphics card only which is the minimum needed to run a pc and see if this still occurs if not stick all your other bits in and see if it bombs out. i.e draw as little power as possible and still the problem exists.

If you dont ask you wont get
Steve Poole
Technical Analyst
Cinram UK ltd

http://WWW.cinram.com

 

[tf1]

The problem with power supplies is that they vary tremendously from make to make. Some cheap 400W PSUs don't have the guts of quality 250W supplies. My Shuttle has a 200W PSU and happily runs a P4/3.0 with a Radeon 9550/256, a Hauppauge TV card, all the other necessary bits and there's several USB bits hanging on it too.

So go for quality and not just the raw wattage quoted. I particularly like the Nexus Real Silent range: not only do they seem to have a good reserve of power, but they have a huge 120mm fan that spins slowly and silently.

http://www.tomshardware.com

is a good place to look for recommendations on which PSU to buy.

Regards: tf1

 

[paparazi]

guptakaps
Dito the above!
300watt quality power supply might be enough if other components are mainstream but if you also have a large amount of ram and a kick ass graphics and addon PCI cards you are getting close to it's limit.
If you have a generic PSU (unbranded no name) swop out with some urgency, failed generic PSU's tend to damage several other components when they die, HDD's and CDroms go first.
Just consider how much money you have spent on your CPU, graphics card and Hard drive, is it really worth fitting a $25 PSU?
Go for Antec, Enermax, Zalman, Channel well, FSP, Tagen etc
Martin




We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[guptakaps]

Well I have bought a 400w PSU but it still crashes. I have also tried it running it with just the hard disk, graphic card ,and memory...but no success. Would a Hard drive corruption cause this?...but the funny thing is that the chkdsk does show any issues with the hard disk either.

K.

 

[tf1]

There are so many possibilities! It doesn't seem likely to be the HDD - which leaves everything else.

Try downloading SiSoft Sandra and test all components to see if it can find a problem.

Also make sure that all the fans are running smoothly and it isn't a heat problem.

Make sure you have a good power connection as a glitch in the power supply could cause this to happen.

Regards: tf1

 

[guptakaps]

checked with Sisoft Sandra and it did not find any problem. The only thing it reported was that CPU speed is 800 Mhz while RAM speed is 400 MHZ so it would be a good idea to get a faster speen RAM and that CPU might be starving!!??

Does look like a heat problem because I am running motherboard monitor to check the heat and it reports heat to be under control.

Have emailed Giga byte with all the specifications as well..they might be able to help

Another thing i tried was to install Windows 2000 server and it wouldn't install this and fails with the same error. In addition it also displays this:
UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP

Have checked some websites for this error and they all say it is most likely to be a memory fault, but I have checked memory already with memtest. Not sure what else to try.

K.

 

[tf1]

The reported 400 MHz RAM is correct. You should have a matched pair of 400MHz PC3200 RAM sticks, they sit on an 800MHz bus and the processor addresses each stick alternatively. So the bus runs at 800MHz, whilst each stick of RAM is only running at 400 MHZ and working every alternate bus clock cycle.

Is you motherboard populated correctly?

tf1

 

[guptakaps]

yes..the mother board auto detects when there is only one chip installed ot two. When using the single 512 MB stick it runs in the single side mode. I have tried installing two 128MB chips so that it operates in Dual chanel technology, and it recognises that properly, but still no luck..system still reboots randomly.

And yes, the motherboard detects the speed correctly.

K.